We started burning this week so I decided to go up on the mountain for more firewood. I found four or five dead aspen trees near Robinson Reservoir. It made a pretty good truckload. One funny thing was that aspen leaves were falling into a thick layer of subalpine fir. The fir needles were lush and green, but they were also profusely decorated with aspen leaves. It made it seem as if the fir trees were growing both needles and leaves.

I was thinking about this quote from Zane Grey today: "Utah was far west and a wilder country than that he had roamed for years. He liked the looks of it, the long reaches of wasteland, the vast vulge and heave of the ranges, the colored walls of stone, the buttes standing alone, and the red and black mystery of the mountains." --Robber's Roost, 1932.

Zane Grey's Robber's Roost was set in the brakes of the Dirty Devil River east of the Henry Mountains. Evidently, Grey's protagonist felt the way I do. I, too, like the looks of it, the empty badlands, the silent mountains, and the dry washes.

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